KINSKI, EXPLODING HEADS SAVE THIS 'CREATURE' FEATURE
Miami Herald, The (FL) - May 28, 1985
Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
Creature is a clone of Alien (1979), even down to the advertising art work, which shows the creature bearing a marked resemblance to the alien -- something of a cross between an alligator and an anteater with an overdose of implacable evil thrown in. This makes Creature something of a genre straggler, the market for horror -in-space having peaked a couple years ago, and the film would be unremarkable except for the presence among the cast of Klaus Kinski, who is undeniably the weirdest star in contemporary motion pictures.
Kinski could probably name his project, but with very few exceptions -- Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo the most recent and notable -- he seems to prefer potboilers; as he said several years ago, "I like bad cinema."
Creature is indeed pretty bad, though it does have some competent effects work, including one of the better exploding- head sequences since Brian De Palma perfected the art in The Fury.
As it happens, however, Kinski's screen time is not large. He plays the lone survivor of a German deep-space research mission menaced by the creature, and as is so often the case in his "special-guest" appearances, his character acts according to motives that are at best obscure. His first move upon making contact with a rival American research team is the attempted rape of their security chief, a towering dominatrix named Bryce. Only after she whaps him around her neon-and-chrome boudoir does Klaus settle down and warn the rest of the folks what they're up against: a 200,000-year-old carnivore that controls its victims by putting little brain-eating crabs on their heads and letting them burrow for the cerebrum.
The only time Creature is at all fun is when the Kinski character reverts to form, lunging at Bryce while they're on patrol, cackling happily when she cuffs him across his life- support system. It's a shame when the braineater finally gets to him, and his head swells up.
By that time the movie is irredeemably formulaic, departing from the plot of the far superior Alien only in minor detail. As usual, Kinski is ill-used by his pot-boiling bosses, who always miss the point: He makes a far better villain than the most fearsome of anteaters; he's even implacable.
Creature (R) **
CAST
Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Marie Laupin, Lyman Ward, Robert Jaffe, Annette McCarthy, Diane Salinger, Klaus Kinski.
CREDITS
Director: William Malone. Producers: William Dunn, William Malone. Screenwriters: William Malone, Alan Reed. Cinematographer: Harry Mathias. Music: Thomas Chase, Steve Rucker.
A CFR Corporation release. Running time: 92 minutes. Vulgar language, nudity, sexual situations, violence and gore.
Herald movie critics rate movies from zero to four stars.
'CREATURE' REVEALS ITSELF AS ANOTHER SCI-FI RIPOFF
SACRAMENTO BEE - April 29, 1985
Author: George Williams Bee Reviewer
YOU HAVE TO to admire the audacity of Creature with its bargain-basement sets, soap-opera acting - and its grand larceny of plot lines from about a dozen other sci-fi horror flicks. The backdrops and the actors are neatly woven into this claustrophobic adventure, and the stolen scenes were lifted from some very good movies.
When an American space vehicle lands on a moon of Saturn, it finds a German mission got there first, but there is no sign of life from the still-steaming craft. The American crew, half men, half women, is low on oxygen and attempts to borrow some from their European colleagues, only to find the Germans have been vulturized by an outer-space monster who is still hungry and still around.
The monster was aboard an ancient spaceship that crashed on the moon 200 centuries earlier. It was part of an insect collection gathered from throughout the universe. It was resting harmlessly in a cocoon until the earth visitors blundered onto it and cracked the cocoon's shell. As one of the earthlings says, It does not become a butterfly in the summer.
Among the actors, Klaus Kinski is particularly hammy as a German astronaut who turns up as the only survivor of his mission - or is he? Stan Ivar as the American commander, Wendy Schaal as his chief electronics officer, Lyman Ward representing the corporation that built the American craft and Diane Salinger as the security officer all seem to have learned their lines well and almost make it through the movie without tripping over the scenery.
The lighting is restrained, and most of the low-budget sets are hidden in shadows. This helps to heighten the realistic feeling of Creature, which is ably directed by William Malone, who also helped to write the derivative script. Malone keeps his cameras focused on tight little corners to create a closed-in kind of atmosphere that makes for some edge-of-the-seat moments when you forget you've seen this same story in a movie at least a dozen times before.
CREATURE
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Lyman Ward, Diane Salinger. Director: William Malone. Screenplay: Malone and Alan Reed. Photography: Harry Mathias. Distributor: Cardinal Entertainment Corp. and Trans Word Entertainment Inc. Running time: 91 minutes.
Arden, State, Birdcage, and Forty Niner and Sacramento drive-ins.
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - May 31, 1985
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR: STAFF
GHOULIES: A "Gremlins" rip-off starring Peter Liapis and Lisa Pelikan. Movie Guide: code rating, PG-13; sex, one scene; violence, fairly graphic; nudity, none; language, perhaps an occasional profanity. Playing at selected theaters around town. `Ghoulies' not likely to frighten true horror -movie aficionados By Eleanor Ringel Film Editor
"Ghoulies" is a harmless "Gremlins" rip-off whose main attraction is a number of cleverly designed puppets that look like Muppets that have been through a Cuisinart.
The plot concerns a nice-enough college student named Jonathan (Peter Liapis) who inherits a not-very-nice mansion that was once home to a cabal of devil worshippers led by Jonathan's dad, Malcolm (Michael Des Barres).
Jonathan and his cute girlfriend, Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan), move in, but before you can say "hellzapoppin'," he's spending all his time reading Daddy's old books on dat ol' black magic. Guess what gets whom in its spell?
It takes Rebecca a little while to figure out what's going on until the day she comes home and finds her lover in the basement, dressed in Dad's conjuring clothes and summoning up an indoor thunderstorm. "Becky, you're home early," gulps our hero, sounding as if he's been caught with another woman instead of another dimension.
Rebecca packs her bags, but Jonathan, using his magic powers, gets her to come back and start dressing like a Charles Addams character. He also invites his buddies over for a heck of a dinner party in which, given the ghoulies' perverse appetites, the guests end up as the main course. Meanwhile, out back, Daddy has risen from the grave and is ready to show Sonny-boy that there's no ghoul li ke an old ghoul.
In its relatively restrained bloodletting and sporadic attempts at character development, "Ghoulies" is mercifully old-fashioned (i.e., early '60s). Compared to a ghastly thing such as "Superstition," it almost seems good-natured and well-written. Actually, it's neither, but the actors do try to keep straight faces - even during a party scene in which Trivial Pursuit and Charades are rejected in favor of A Ritual -and the director, Luca Bercovici, doesn't seem all that obsessed with staging a gory floor show.
The tongue-in-cheek ad - a ghoulie popping out of a toilet - is misleading, though possibly useful to more disenchanted movie critics. The film flirts with campiness, but is essentially straightforward about its ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties.
However, these things that go bump in the night aren't likely to turn up bumping around in your nightmares, either. As scary movies go, this one's only a little more frightening than Disney World's Haunted House.
A film-lore footnote: Jonathan conjures up a pair of non-puppet dwarfs dressed like extras from a midget's version of "The Ring of Nibelung." One of them, Tamara de Treaux, once spent a few months as E.T.'s innards. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'GHOULIES' TAKES THE LOW ROAD
Boston Globe - April 27, 1985
Author: Michael Blowen, Globe Staff
High Concept.
This Hollywood phrase perfectly describes "Ghoulies" - a genetic misfit that wants us to believe it's a cross between two Steven Spielberg productions - "Gremlins" and the soon-to-be-released "Goonies."
Under the High Concept concept, the filmmakers needn't worry about quality direction, convincing performances and professional production design because the whole reason behind the movie is a title and advertising campaign.
The story is stupid. A couple moves into a house. The man conjures up spirits. The spirits harass her. She screams. He becomes a sorcerer. His father returns from the dead. They fight. Sonny wins. The couple drives away.
The production uses the old house as a single set, thereby cutting costs to a minimum. They save on actors by hiring a bunch of stiffs who'll seemingly do anytyhing to be in the movie business.
The producers may be jaded and sleazy with this sort of exploitation but they realize a fundamental law of the movie business - once the theater has your money, it's tough to get it back.
The advertisement will attract certain people to the theater under the false notion that it's a frightening monster picture. The ad features a Gremlin-like creature emerging from a toilet bowl. The patrons of horror films might be attracted by that. But, instead of capturing the audience, the producers have created a marvelous metaphor for their own behavior. May they reap what they have sown.
MOVIE REVIEW GHOULIES - Directed by Luca Bercovici, written by
Bercovici and Jefery Levy, starring Peter Liapis, Lisa
Pelikan, Michael Des Barres and Jack Nance as Wolfgang, at
the Cinema 57 and suburbs, rated PG-13 (violence). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ad for 'Ghoulies' really says it all
San Diego Union, The (CA) - January 22, 1985
Author: David Elliott, Movie Critic
For the Glasshouse Theater's first showing of "Ghoulies," 22 customers, including me, showed up. I was there to review. What's their excuse?
Maybe we were all siren-charmed by the ad. The one of a ghoulie, a little geek of gunk with snappy suspenders and sawmill teeth, rising up out of a toilet. Perhaps all of us hoped he'd be popping up in the movie with the Tidy Bowl man in his mouth. But in the film, Ghoulie comes out of the toilet once, for two seconds -- he's only there to justify the ad.
"Ghoulies" is a Dumb Teens in Creepy Old House movie. The leading character, Jonathan, comes from an old line of devil worshipers who did well in Los Angeles real estate. (Don't they all?) He has inherited the mansion, including the bulging, black magic library of his late father. After learning to babble in a kind of Spanish Latin with Transylvanian overtones, his eyes glow lime-green while frisky creepies, or "ghoulies," come out of the woodwork to do his bidding.
In my favorite scene, Jonathan has his satanic robes on and is starting to light up with infernal power down in the basement. His young wife, Rebecca, still in the dark about The Dark One, opens the door. They converse:
"Jonathan, what's going on here?"
"Rebecca, you're home early!"
Rebecca looks perplexed, but goes up to fix dinner. She must have read in Modern Bride that every husband needs a hobby. Later, of course, when she is in a zombie state and the dinner guests have been minced into leftovers by the ghoulies, she must realize (dimly, in her case) that Jonathan wasn't down there rehearsing for the office Halloween party. For horror flick teeny-heads like Rebecca, revelation is always a little too late.
Nothing in "Ghoulies" matches for impact the alluring ad, a pitch that's barely true to the movie but does, in essence, define the "genre." Director Luca Bercovici concedes creative control to special effects contriver John Buechler, who gets on a roll with his ghoulies. These snarling, skittering dermatological disasters drip pus and slime, but are sort of lovably revolting. They seem to know they're marketable, like the critters in "Gremlins."
The sagging truth is that most of the newer shock movies are so sullied by satirical irony that they're not scary. They're so busy "just kidding" that they barely go "boo." They seem to be made for teenagers who are nostalgic for the safe TV spooks of their childhood. For those of us with richer childhoods, the cry rises: "O Vincent Price, where art thou now?"
Here's another angle on the importance of "Ghoulies." Assuming that we 22 morbid suckers each paid $3 at the door, and didn't slip in through the theater plumbing, ghoulie-style, that means on a lovely afternoon in San Diego at least $66 went into the coffers of this, uh, film. But, hey man, why beef? Tell it to the kids in Ethiopia.
"Ghoulies" * An Empire Pictures release. Directed by Luca Bercovici. Produced by Jefery Levy. Photogaphy by Mac Halberg. Written by Luca Bercovici, Jefery Levy. Music by Richard Band, Shirley Walker. Rated PG-13. At local theaters. The Cast- Peter Liapis-Jonathan, Lisa Pelikan-Rebecca, Michael Des Barres-Malcolm, Jack Nance-Wolfgang.
"FRIGHT NIGHT": A HORROR FLICK WITH LITTLE BITE - Special effects can't overcome the thin plot of this minor piece of the macabre
The Dallas Morning News - August 12, 1985
Author: Robert Denerstein, Scripps Howard News Service
Sprinkle them with holy water and they blister. Shove a crucifix in their faces and they cringe. Lure them onto the sunny side of the street and they're history.
We're talking vampires. We're also talking Fright Night, a wild fun house of a movie that contains one of the more menacing members of the breed and some ghoulishly rewarding special effects.
The vampire in Fright Night is played by Chris Sarandon, who gives a finely exaggerated performance, something on the order of Chris Sarandon doing Joan Crawford.
Sarandon's Jerry Dandridge is a vampire who's as at home in a disco as he is in his coffin. He's not afraid to flash his beautiful teeth; to quote Billy Crystal, he looks "mahvelous.'
But unlike George (Love At First Bite) Hamilton, Sarandon isn't lovable. Anger him and he goes for the jugular.
The story begins when Jerry moves next door to Charley (Wil-
liam Ragsdale), a teen-ager who lives with his mom. Jerry, not exactly the ideal neighbor, lives in a rickety house that has so much eerie, horror -movie smoke seeping out of it, it seems an apt target for an environmental impact statement. There's more. Every morning, a body (remains from the previous night's fun) is carted out of the house in a garbage bag.
One night, Charley looks out of his window and sees Jerry take a bite from his date's neck. This raises a big question: If you're the average teen-ager, just how do you persuade others that you're telling the truth about the vampire next door? Even your girlfriend (Amanda Bearse) won't believe you. Neither will Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys), the weirdest kid in town, the one with the Jack Nicholson smile and the porcupine haircut.
In desperation, you consult a TV personality, a washed up actor (Roddy McDowall), who's doing an Elvira-like turn on a local TV station. He's Peter Vincent, vampire killer. Not surprisingly, he's a fraud.
All of this is efficiently handled by first-time director Tom Holland, who builds toward an effective special-effects finale.
Consider the wolf, the one that creeps toward its doom with a stake in its heart. Or how about Sarandon's transformations, like the one from vampire to sharp-toothed bat.
Holland, who also wrote the script, pokes fun at recent slasher films in which young virgins are hacked apart by maniacs in ski masks.
This time the young virgin is seduced by a vampire in a couple of erotic scenes. Ms. Bearse makes a convincing transformation from teen-ager to woman to, well, go see for yourself.
Don't expect a masterpiece of the macabre. The plot is thin, the movie isn't as funny as it thinks it is and there's sloppiness in the script, the unexplained disappearance of Charley's mother from the story, for example.
Fright Night, R-rated with profanity, nudity and violence, is strictly a jolt-and-bolt affair that stays close to the surface. Although it never gives you much to sink your teeth into, it does deliver the nerve-wracking goods. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "FRIGHT NIGHT' SCARES UP LAUGHTER
Akron Beacon Journal (OH) - August 6, 1985
Author: Bill O'Connor, Beacon Journal movie critic
Suppose you went to see a stage show and the entertainer came out and told sly little jokes, made wry comments on familiar aspects of life.
Then, suddenly, the guy sat down on a chair and told you a serious story about an ax murderer.
Not the best combination for an entertainment. Well, much the same problem afflicts Fright Night, the latest vampire movie. It's not that Fright Night is a bad retelling of the vampire story. In fact, the plot is interesting. Chris Sarandon is an hypnotic vampire, and the idea of Roddy McDowall playing a fading horror -movie star has possibilities.
But Fright Night gets stuck in the goo of its own muddy conception of itself. Writer and director Tom Holland just can't make up his mind. Much of Fright Night is in the general tone of Love At First Bite, where we laughed at the whole vampire idea.
Yet, other parts of Fright Night, especially the last 20 minutes or so when the special effects are trotted out, are serious attempts at making a vampire/ horror movie.
The story is that high schooler Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), while smooching with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse), glances out the window and notices some strange activity. Charley notices two men carrying a coffin into the house next door. The men, the suave Jerry Dandridge (Sarandon), and his cold-eyed sidekick, Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), are new neighbors.
There are several murders in the city, and Charley begins to notice more strange activities next door. Finally, he realizes that Jerry is a vampire.
The cops won't believe him, so Charley seeks help from Peter Vincent (McDowall), the ex-movie star who now hosts a TV show, Fright Night. Charley reasons that Vincent would be able to prove that Jerry is more than your average guy with big teeth.
As Charley is drawn more deeply into the activities next door, so is his girlfriend. In all vampire movies, there is a strong sexual undercurrent. That, in fact, is the main appeal of these movies, an appeal that Love At First Bite exploited so well. That sexual undertone is the only memorable thing about Fright Night, and that is only because of one scene in which Jerry dances an erotic, seductive dance with Amy as she is drawn hypnotically to him.
The change in tone, the shifting of gears, though, grinds the movie's good points into dust. For most of the movie, Vincent is played as a fool, a pompous minor leaguer. Stephen Geoffreys is just awful as Evil Ed, Charley's buddy. Geoffreys plays him in such a manic way that we can get no handle on who Ed is. The romance of Charley and Amy is played strictly for laughs, a will- she-or-won't-she farce.
All this is changed abruptly at the end when we're supposed to get involved in a serious vampire hunt, one that is filled with danger.
In these climatic scenes, there are a lot of special effects -- melting bad guys, fangs, horrible faces -- but they fail to involve us. They fail because the story and characters, at this point, exist to serve the special effects, and it should be the opposite.
The overall problem is that we don't fear what we laugh at.
Movie review : Fright Night Stars: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale Director: Tom Holland Studio: Columbia Pictures Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes Theaters: Akron Square, Chapel Hill, Kent Plaza, Belden Village and Gala and Magic City drive-ins Rating: R for language and violence * * ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOVIE REVIEW- `Fright Night' puts bite on audiences with ghoulish fun
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - August 5, 1985
Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF
Fright Night: Written and directed by Tom Holland. Movie Guide: code rating, R; sex, mildly implied; violence, considerable; nudity, some female; language, a few bursts of profanity. Opens today at metro-area theaters.
"Fright Night" is hardly a classic horror flick, but it has several stunning moments and is infinitely more subtle and witty than "Friday the 13th."
Tom Holland, the writer and novice director, was previously known as the author of scripts for "Cloak & Dagger," "Psycho II" and other thrillers. "Fright Night" is his pet project, a long-awaited opportunity to tell a version of "the boy who cried wolf."
His teenage hero, Charley, correctly deduces that the new neighbor is a vampire, but he can't convince anyone about the supernatural menace even after grisly murders take place in the community.
When friends and police turn a deaf ear to Charley's warnings, he seeks the aid of Peter Vincent, a ham actor who hosts a TV monster-movie show. By accident, Peter becomes convinced of the vampire threat, but he is a coward and retreats to his shabby apartment. Charley is left alone to battle the powerful enemy.
Chris Sarandon plays the vampire in the glamorous-romantic-smart style of Frank Langella. This is unquestionably Sarandon's most entertaining film performance. You believe that he could bamboozle the police, charm gullible middle-aged ladies and debauch innocent teenagers all in the same evening.
In an intriguing variation on routine, the vampire's assistant is played as a pink-cheeked jock by Jonathan Stark. Endless speculation could center around this master/
slave relationship.
William Ragsdale is alert and frisky as Charley, the hero. His nerdish friend is played by Stephen Geoffreys, a resourceful actor who brings more emotion to the part than it deserves. After a chase down the longest and most deserted alley in modern America, he becomes one of the vampire's first victims. Later, when he is one of the "undead," Geoffreys has a powerful scene, but it is ruined by the comically massive fangs with which his mouth is outfitted.
Peter Vincent, the TV host, is not a consistently written character. He alter nates abruptly between quivering cowardice and stalwart heroism. Roddy McDowall, never an actor to worry about such trifles, milks the role for all it's worth. He is clearly having a great time and is a major contributor to the movie's sense of fun.
It's too bad that Charley's mother (played by Dorothy Fielding) is the most cartoonish sort of movie parent. She is distracted to the point of imbecility. This really wasn't necessary.
Another irritation is that Charley is strangely ignorant of vampire lore. This is an unconvincing lapse since he stays up late every night to watch horror movies on television.
Finally, there is not much consistency in the use of remedies. At one point, Peter Vincent has already successfully used a cross to foil a vampire. When he tries the method again, he has no luck and is informed that it's because he doesn't have faith. If so, why did the trick work the first time?
Caption: The last two paragraphs did not appear in the final edition. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A MOVIE CAPTURES THE TEENAGE GORY DAYS
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 3, 1985
Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic
Hollywood figured it out about 30 years ago: Teenagers make up the biggest chunk of the horror -movie audience.
In the '50s, we got high-schooler Steve McQueen battling The Blob and Michael Landon sprouting werewolf hair. In the '60s, Count Yorga stalked the Southern California beach-party set.
In the '70s, the monster angle was dropped completely. Who needs vampires or giant spiders? Splatter flicks offered enthusiasts exactly what they were seeking in its most gory, undiluted form: promiscuous teens stalked and butchered by a huge, masked maniac wielding a phallic knife.
Now, in a blatant attempt to tap the same exploitation audience, we are given Fright Night, a special-effects bloodfest combining Risky Business-style teen antics with the staples of vintage vampire flicks. Written and directed by Tom Holland, whose witty script was the best part of 1983's Psycho II, it will be of interest only to devotees of state-of-the-art gore.
Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) is your basic small-town teen. He goes to school. He hangs out at the fast-food joints. On TV he watches junky monster movies introduced by a faded horror -movie actor named Peter Vincent (Roddy McDowall).
And he's got sex problems. He and his cute-as-a-button girlfriend don't seem to connect. When they get intimate, they get awkward - they're hopelessly stalled in the transition to post-virginhood.
All of a sudden, a suave gent moves in next door. Jerry Dandrige, played with smooth aplomb by Chris Sarandon, oozes sex appeal. Every night it seems some beautiful woman is going into his house. Only problem is, they never come out.
Charley begins to suspect that Mr. Dandrige is not your ordinary neighbor - that, perhaps, he sucks blood for a living. Naturally, nobody believes him. Not even pathetic Vincent, who has been fired by the local TV station and wants nothing to do with this wild-eyed teen.
What's Charley to do but sharpen a few stakes, surround himself with crucifixes and prepare to do battle with the neighborhood creature of the night?
On paper, it's a wonderful idea - Spielberg-style teens stalking a vampire. But Holland undercuts the material by making just about every wrong move possible.
Fright Night's tone is inconsistent. Instead of giving the story a sense of the fantastic, Holland keeps matters morbid, even threatening. Elements of camp are tossed around casually, but the humor is flat. Holland never uses them in the classic fashion - to deflate tension.
Nor does Holland show any dexterity with his actors. They either are poorly cast or they emote shamelessly. Only Sarandon has the poise to overcome this lack of creative direction.
Fright Night's violent effects are frequent and intense. It's not so much splatter-movie gore, where heads are lopped off by giant axes swung from the darkness. It's people turning into animals with plenty of makeup, oozing slime and tiny, mechanical creatures.
But the biggest problem is that Holland doesn't understand that this type of fright fantasy only works when the director places his characters in a realistic setting. You have to believe the characters could actually exist or there's no sense of exhilaration when the plot takes a turn for the bizarre.
The truth is, Holland's not really interested in his characters. He doesn't care enough to breathe life into them. They're just imitations of teens we've seen a thousand times before.
Holland wants to get to the gore as fast as he can and then keep it splashing. Which is what Fright Night is all about.
FRIGHT NIGHT * *
Produced by Herb Jaffe, written and directed by Tom Holland, photography by Jan Kiesser, music by Brad Fiedel, distributed by Columbia Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 32 mins.
Jerry Dandrige - Chris Sarandon
Charley Brewster - William Ragsdale
Amy Peterson - Amanda Bearse
Peter Vincent - Roddy McDowall
Evil Ed - Stephen Geoffreys
Billy Cole - Jonathan Stark
Parent's guide: R (violence, profanity, adult situations) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAKEUP MAKES SCARY FILM
SACRAMENTO BEE - August 3, 1985
Author: George Williams Bee Reviewer
IT'S BEEN A lot of years since we've had a real, visually scary vampire movie. To match the kind of stunning impact provided in the new 'Fright Night,' you'd have to go way back to Lon Chaney - The Man of a Thousand Faces
in the silent era.
The star of 'Fright Night' is the makeup man, Richard Edlund, the Oscar-winner who created the special makeup effects for movies like 'Ghostbusters' and 'Poltergeist,' not to mention the 'Star Wars' trilogy. His vampire effects are superb.
This is not to take away from Roddy McDowall and Chris Sarandon, whose* acting lifts 'Fright Night' immeasurably. Sarandon, a respected Broadway performer, displays the right combination of sexuality and danger to make the vampire a credible creature. And McDowall, the former MGM child star, seems to get better with age. He has the especially difficult challenge of playing a bad actor, a former horror movie star like Vincent Price. He's funny and wonderfully convincing.
The story is about a teenager, Charley Brewster, who discovers a vampire has moved in next door. No one believes him, of course, when he tries to get help. Neither his mother nor his lover, Amy. Not the police. Not even his best friend, Evil Ed Thompson.
But the former horror film star, Peter Vincent, takes an interest. Probably because Vincent's creature-features television show has been canceled and the ham actor sees Charley's problem as a way to make some easy money.
But Jerry Dandridge, the vampire, is more than a mere problem. When you can come out of your grave at night and present yourself as a handsome and mesmerizing playboy with superhuman strength, well, not even your own mother is safe from his lust to suck the blood out of people while they sleep. It's going to take more than crucifixes and garlic to bring this vampire down to size.
Edlund may have created the ultimate in vampire makeup and optical effects to make the Jerry Dandridge monster believable. So believable, in fact, that you feel a seam. The first half of the movie is funny horror . The second half, the Edlund half, well, there's nothing funny about it. It's just plain horror .
Director Tom Holland is a former actor who knows how to give actors room to do their thing. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA and a California attorney, he has written a number of heralded screenplays, including the script for 'Psycho II.' He's an Alfred Hitchcock fan, which shows clearly in the inventiveness and black humor of 'Fright Night,' his directing debut. FRIGHT NIGHT Cast: Chris Sarandon, Roddy McDowall, William Ragsdale, Amanda Pearse, Stephen Geoffreys. Writer-director: Tom Holland. Producer: Herb Jaffe. Photography: Jan Kiesser. Production design: John De Cuir Jr. Editor: Kent Beyda. Music: Brad Fiedel. Distributor: Columbia.
Sacramento Inn, State, Birdcage, and Sacramento and Forty Niner drive-ins.
Rating: R, for scaring the daylights out of you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'FRIGHT NIGHT' IS TERRIFIC
Boston Globe - August 2, 1985
Author: Jay Carr, Globe Staff
Could Tom Holland be the next Ron Howard? Like Howard, Holland is a TV actor turned film director, and I'd say he has a future. His first feature, "Fright Night," is a clever comedy of horrors -
a slick reworking of the Dracula legend into contemporary terms for the teen market. It begins by using the same kind of
lurid lettering emblazoned across cheap late-night horror movies. But Holland has more on his mind than campy parody. He doesn't just use the Dracula iconography. He clearly understands the subtexts in that most Victorian of novels, and parades them across the screen in elegantly creepy ways, putting a real charge on his material.
His starting point is the fact that in this supposedly rational age, nobody believes in vampires. When one moves next door to teenager William Ragsdale, and Ragsdale tells his mother and the cops, his mother's reaction is predictable: "Want a Valium?" He bombs when he goes to the cops, even though he saw the vampire's buddy carry out a body. Ironically, the vampire is the only one who believes him. The catch is that the vampire intends to kill him that night, and almost does, as the world, starting with his lonely, divorced mother, turns a deaf ear. To them, he's just the boy who cried bat.
Rightly, the film is built around Chris Sarandon's seductive powers as the vampire. He gains access to the boy's house by seducing the boy's mother. Like Frank Langella in the recent stage version of "Dracula," Sarandon is sexy. As Bram Stoker's original did, he zeroes in on his adversary's woman. The kid's girlfriend (Amanda Bearse) is afraid of sex, but clearly fascinated by it. In short, she's ripe for a Dracula - a projection of her fears and desires - and fangs of her own. Even the kid's be st friend, played by that disheveled leprechaun, Stephen Geoffreys, is skeptical, and it costs him. He's turned into the contemporary version of Dracula's disciple, the fly-eating Renfield.
Ragsdale's only ally for the late-night showdown in the vampire's chic, restored Victorian gothic digs is Roddy McDowall, the local late-night TV horror movie host, who once hunted vampires on screen himself, but whose crucifix has been gathering dust, and who isn't inclined to believe Ragsdale. Still, he and "Fright Night" know their way around crucifixes and garlic. The duel is a good one. The often gushing special effects really seem special. Sarandon is a vampire in whose evil powers we can believe, even during the film's light moments, when it barely skirts self-parody. There's a lot of deft work on view here, including Ragsdale's frightened young hero, which means the director must have done something right in back of the camera as well a s in front of the word processor. "Fright Night" is a clammy winner. Caption: PHOTO
Memo: MOVIE REVIEW FRIGHT NIGHT - Directed and written by Tom Holland.
Starring Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse,
Stephen Geoffreys, Roddy McDowall. At the Cinema 57 and
suburbs, rated R (impalings, dismemberments, simulated sex). -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'FRIGHT' RECALLS HORROR OF THE GOOD OLD NIGHTS Miami Herald, The (FL) - August 2, 1985
Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
Fright Night is not what you think. It is not just another wheeze from the slasher cartel, nor does it star Linda Blair. It's not Citizen Kane, either, but what the heck: This is summer.
Fright Night is about the vampire who moves in next door, and according to director Tom Holland, it's an attempt to "update" the whole idea of Dracula. But what it does best is quite the opposite: Fright Night resurrects the blissful naivete and dizzy plot implausibilities of the great wave of horror films of the 1950s and '60s, the Bronze Age of cinema.
It's daffy and sweet and sometimes unintentionally funny. It's even scary in its closing moments, when the genre- sanctified confrontation -- a boy with a wooden stake against the suave undead -- is re-enacted wholly without irony, as if Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Hammer Films, not to mention Bela Lugosi and Abbott and Costello, had never drawn blood.
Holland is a screenwriter (Class of 1984, Psycho II, Cloak and Dagger) making his directing debut, and his idea of something new is to have teen-agers discover odd doings next door, and turn to a washed-up horror -film star (played by Roddy McDowall with epochal fidgetiness) for help. The teens are sexually repressed, but this is not really new; the vampire legends ooze Freud.
Holland was smart enough to keep the good old stuff in, too, from shape shifting to tricks of the undead trade (a vampire may not enter your house to bite you unless he has been invited in by the "rightful owner"). The cast plays them out with all the corn and plot holes (where is everyone else in the neighborhood, much less the cops, when the screams start in the old manse?) of the vintage Dracula spin-offs.
What's fun about Fright Night is that comforting sense of deja vu, by which one feels oneself stepping back, back, back in time, to an era when horror films were unabashedly dumb.
Fright Night is as silly as a film about hungry ghouls can be, and with the exception of an eccentric-teen turn by Stephen Geoffreys, a spiky-haired supporting player who looks as if he just wandered in from The Breakfast Club, there isn't really a "modern" moment in it. The movie is bloody and gruesome and quite harmless, just the way they made them "in the good old days."
Fright Night (R) ** 1/2
CAST: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amada Bearse, Roddy McDowall, Stephen Geoffreys, Jonathan Stark.
CREDITS: Director: Tom Holland. Producer: Herb Jaffe. Screenwriter: Tom Holland. Cinematographer: Jan Kiesser. Music: Brad Fiedel. A Columbia Pictures release.
Running time: 104 minutes. Vulgar language, nudity, sexual situations, violence and gore.
Herald movie reviewers rate movies from zero to four stars.
"Fright Night." A thriller starring Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Stephen Geoffreys, Amanda Bearse and Roddy McDowall. Written and directed by Tom Holland. Photographed by Jan Kiesser. Edited by Kent Beyda. Music by Brad Fiedel. Running time: 100 minutes. A Columbia release. In area theaters.
Well, now, it's been a long time between fright flicks.
Time was, many of us were members of the Horror -of-the-Week Club, what with the assorted "Omen," "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" installments released on cue and ready to sow seductive seeds of corruption in our sleep. Every week, they invaded our mass consciousness, and then, poof! All of a sudden, they were gone.
Fear not, the genre is not dead and certainly not buried; it's back - and it's as vicious and mechanical as ever.
First, we had George Romero's "Day of the Dead," an unsettling tale of flesh-eating zombies, a mad doctor and medical zealotry. And now we have Tom Holland's "Fright Night," which is no less than a youth version of that old horror chestnut, the blood-sucking vampire movie.
This is a first, says Holland, who refuses to acknowledge "Love at First Bite" and "The Hunger," two vampire fables that respectively featured such creaky actors as George Hamilton, Susan Saint James and Richard Benjamin, and David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. Holland means to pump new blood into the genre. (The pun is very much intended.)
The difference between "Fright Night" and other fright flicks is that Holland's film generally is dominated by an innocence. In fact, it is very much an innocent version of "Day of the Dead." Both films feature supernaturals - either vampires or the undead - who feed on the living in order to survive.
"Fright Night" is amiably gross and not one whit sexually retro. What I mean is that, unlike "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th," this film does not resort to using horror as a punishment for sexual curiosity. Random screwing or petting is not followed by a blood ritual here. There is no random screwing or petting here. Sex, in fact, has almost nothing to do with it and, blessedly, "Fright Night" also is free of the usual direct scatological references.
Of course, these omissions do not necessarily make "Fright Night" a good movie. For one thing, it is a structural mess, alternating a campy tone with a tragic one and leaving the viewer (at least, this viewer) feeling discombobulated, instead of with a feeling of dread. The film also has one too many ugly little creatures, covered with saliva, snot and fecal-looking matter. Its scatological references are indirect. As I said earlier, this movie is gross.
Holland's plot is about a nitwit named Charley Brewster (newcomer William Ragsdale), who spends far too much time alone in his room watching old horror movies on creepy Peter Vincent's TV show. Vincent (played by Roddy McDowall) claims to be a real-life vampire killer (actually, he's a ham actor) and specializes in showing vampire movies.
Well, to make a long story short, Charley becomes convinced that the two single gentlemen who have moved in next door are vampires. Nobody believes him, of course, and to add injury to insult, the head vampire (Chris Sarandon) elects to recruit Charley's sexually frightened girlfriend, Amy (Amanda Bearse). Amy is no fool; she knows what happens to girls who sleep with their boyfriends: In horror films, they usually end up hacked up.
Holland, who makes his directorial debut here (he previously scripted ''Psycho II" and "Cloak and Dagger") has consummately crafted his movie and has filled it with more ideas than most big movies you can name. He could be the man to bring the horror movie out of the dark ages. He knows how to create a catharsis.
What he hasn't learned is how to integrate these ideas, which accounts for ''Fright Night's" structural mess.
Parental guide: Rated R for its gory effects. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
STRA-A-ANGE A PAIR OF NEW MOVIES DEMONSTRATES HOW FUNNY THE NIGHTMARISH CAN BE
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - August 2, 1985
Author: GLENN LOVELL, Mercury News Film Writer
THERE'S some seriously weird stuff going on at the movies these days. We're talking cuckoo-crazy, as in stra-a-ange. But don't be alarmed. The odd goings-on in "Fright Night" and "Weird Science" (both opening today) will have you laughing so hard you'll almost forget your fears.
Almost -- but not quite.
As every spooky spoof from "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" to "Ghostbusters" reminds us, the horror genre with its creaky cliches and moldy monsters is perfect for teasing.
And that's exactly what the two young filmmakers behind today's new arrivals have done, in films that flit easily from the stylish to the silly, from the erotic to the eerie.
And with this range working for them, it's a safe bet that both will become required summertime viewing for the out-of- school-and-ready-to- howl set.
The more conventional "Fright Night" is an ingenious reworking of the Dracula legend. Only here the hero is a small-town kid with a vivid imagination, the vampire is a Valentino-suave neighbor played by Chris Sarandon, and the fearless vampire killer is a cowardly horror -movie star who's now hosting a "Creature Feature"-type TV program.
But don't go expecting another zany "Love at First Bite" lark. Though there are laughs aplenty in "Fright Night," written and directed by Tom Holland, there are also wonderfully nauseating makeup and bat effects that will have you hiding under your seat.
Indeed, Holland, who wrote "Psycho II" and last summer's overlooked "Cloak & Dagger," has whipped up the best tongue- in-cheek chiller since Joe Dante's "The Howling." And just as the Dante film revitalized the werewolf yarn, "Fright Night" gives the vampire melodrama a much-needed transfusion of humor and suspense.
And just as you think Holland has played his last devilish prank, he one-ups himself with more gruesome surprises and throwaway comedy touches (like the vampire throwing sparks by dragging his long fingernails along a banister).
Newcomer William Ragsdale plays Charley Brewster, a horror - movie buff who spies new neighbor Jerry Dandrige (Sarandon) with his next luscious victim. Charley spends the rest of the movie trying to convince his mom and friends that the mutilation murders being reported nightly are the work of an honest-to-gosh vampire.
Making matters even more frustrating is the fact that Dandrige is a smug charmer who mocks Charley's every feeble attempt to expose him. Like all the best fiends, Dandrige delights in taunting his adversary.
And when he really gets mad, Dandrige puts the bite on Charley's girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) and his already wacked-out buddy (Stephen Geoffreys of "Fraternity Vacation").
Holland, who doesn't always play fair with vampire lore and logic, has great fun making his hero squirm. At every turn Dandrige outsmarts his young crucifix-wielding opponent (Roddy McDowall as the TV show host). Worse, that blankety-blank bloodsucker mesmerizes Amy at the local disco in what has to be one of the hottest, funniest seduction scenes in recent years.
Sarandon really comes into his own as the supercilious vampire who becomes a howling, red-eyed banshee from hell when miffed. Geoffreys is also a scream as the freaky friend who's basically an insecure loser. This is really the old Renfield/ Igor role given a New Wave slant.
Credit Richard Edlund of "Ghostbusters" fame with the amazing visual effects, which include an appallingly graphic reverse transformation from wolf to boy and a dive-bombing vampire bat that's about the size of B-52 bomber.
What Edlund's makeup people do to Bearse's lovely smile in the final basement crypt scenes will have you tossing in your sleep for weeks to come.
'Weird Science" is something else again -- a deliriously funny mix of "National Lampoon's Animal House," "Risky Business," "The Road Warrior" and such vintage Disney hoots as "The Shaggy Dog" and "The Absent-Minded Professor."
Since we're title-dropping, we should add that it's a color-tinted print of that 1935 classic, "The Bride of Frankenstein," that inspires our two young nerd heroes to show up the preppy bullies at school by creating their very own dream girl.
''Just like Frankenstein -- 'cept cuter," drools Gary (Anthony Michael Hall of "Sixteen Candles" and "Breakfast Club").
''I'm not digging up any dead girls," whines the shyer Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith), who lives in mortal terror of his older brother, the snarling CroMagnum (sic) with the boot-camp crewcut.
Of course things have been refined a bit since Dr. Frankenstein's days on the moor. Now our heroes blend computer science with voodoo and a bit of old-fashioned studio fog to create a living doll named Lisa (Kelly LeBrock of "The Woman in Red").
Their toughest decision: Whether to favor boobs over brains.
''I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize," Gary rants in a hilarious variation on the original Frankenstein's exultant "It lives!"
As it turns out, Lisa is as bright and brassy as she is beautiful. And this works out just fine, because she can protect her horny creators from threatening elders, as well as lecture them on the importance of friends who "like you for what you are, not what you pretend to be."
In other words, the boys have hit the jackpot -- a centerfold nanny who shelters them at night and showers with them in the morning.
''Weird Science" runs out of things to say and do, so eventually it resorts to repetitious sight gags and effects as well as the obligatory car chase. But there's still more to howl over here than in any five other teen comedies.
Once again John Hughes ("Sixteen Candles" and "The Breakfast Club"), who also wrote the script, proves himself a master at capturing high-school angst. His young Frankensteins possess all the intensity and nervousness of real misfits, not the cartoonish "Goonies" variety.
And Mitchell-Smith and Hall complement each other beautifully. The former is charming and painfully shy; the latter mouthy and naughty. The mix results in some of the year's funniest moments -- first at a blues bar (where Hall becomes a rappin' "Saaay whaaat?" soul brother), then at a wild and crazy party that's crashed by a Pershing missile and a gang of motorcycle mutants straight out of "Mad Max."
''Weird Science" is a weird concoction all right -- weird, wonderful and unexpected.
Fright Night
(star)(star)(star) 1/2
R (fleeting nudity, nauseating makeup effects)
Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Roddy McDowall Director-screenwriter: Tom Holland
Studio: Released by Columbia Pictures
Weird Science
(star)(star)(star)
PG-13 (profanity, nudity,
emphasis on sex)
Cast: Anthony Michael Hall, Kelly LeBrock, Ilan Mitchell-Smith
Director-screenwriter: John Hughes
Studio: Released by Universal Pictures -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`FRIGHT TAKES DRACULA'S LEGACY IN VEIN
The Record (New Jersey) - August 2, 1985
Author: By Lou Lumenick, Movie Critic: The Record MOVIE REVIEWS
FRIGHT NIGHT: Written and directed by Tom Holland. Director of photography, Jan Kiesser. Music by Brad Fiedel. Editor, Kent Beyda. Special effects coordinator, Richard Edlund. With Chris Sarandon (Jerry), William Ragsdale (Charley), Amanda Bearse (Amy), Roddy McDowall (Peter), Stephen Geoffreys (Evil Ed), and others. Produced by Herb Jaffe. A Vistar Films Production released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 106 minutes. Opens locally today. Rated R: gore, violence, strong language.
57th St. Playhouse, Manhattan. Rated G.
Let's face it. Vampire movies have become a pretty toothless genre.
Sure, we all have fond memories of Bela Lugosi as Dracula. But "Psycho" (1960) marked a turning point in the American horror film. And the real-life horrors (assassinations, the Vietnam war) of the 1960's made the notion of stylish, undead villains lusting after the blood of virgins seem fairly ludicrous. The dull-witted, decidedly unromantic zombies of "The Night of the Living Dead" were a more apt Zeitgeist. They were succeeded by a series of ax-wielding maniacs ("Halloween," "Friday the 13th") determined to mete out punishment to heroines foolish enough to indulge in the new sexual permissiveness.
With the exception of Herzog's "Nosferatu, the Vampyre" and the Frank Langella "Dracula," more recent attempts to return to the classical genre have been unsuccessful. Perhaps screen audiences have become so sophisticated that vampire movies are almost automatically greeted with titters. Who could forget the spectacle of Catherine Deneuve hunkering down into Susan Sarandon's jugular in "The Hunger"? It's no accident that "Lifeforce" wherein vampire aliens from Halley's comet turn London's population into zombies inadvertently turned into one of this summer's funniest movies.
State-of-the-art effects
During the last decade, most of the few vampire movies played it for laughs: George Romero's "Martin," "Court Yorga Vampire," and the best of the genre, "Love at First Bite," with George Hamilton. Now we have "Fright Night," which tries to combine spoofery with gory, state-of-the-art special effects by Richard Edlund ("Ghostbusters," "Lifeforce"). It's like mixing oil and water.
Not that debuting director Tom Holland (he wrote "Psycho II" and "Cloak and Dagger") has anything more than mild chuckles up his sleeve. It's a basic variation on the boy-who-cried-wolf story, about a suburban teen-ager (William Ragsdale) who catches a glimpse of his new next-door neighbor (Chris Sarandon) carrying on the rites of the undead. Unable to persuade his mother or the police that property values are in danger, Ragsdale tries to enlist the aid of Roddy McDowall, a broken-down vampi re movie star who's just been sacked from a job hosting his old flicks on television. ("All they want is demented young men in ski masks hacking up young virgins! ")
McDowall understandably takes Ragsdale as a loony, but is enlisted through the efforts of the kid's girlfriend (Amanda Bearse). She doesn't believe him, either, but pays McDowall to reassure Ragsdale that Sarandon really isn't a vampire. Only it turns out Sarandon doesn't cast a shadow, and McDowall winds up fighting a real, as opposed to reel, vampire. You get the general idea. . . .
Playing a part more suited for Vincent Price or Christopher Lee, McDowall is mildly amusing as the cowardly horror -film star, though his characterization lacks bite. Sarandon looks merely embarrassed as the bogeyman, and there's an uncomfortable suggestion of a sexual relationship between his character and the young man who tends to his coffin. The young leads are merely bland.
Holland throws in more plot twists than you can shake a crucifix at, but his chase scenes are so tiring that all that's left to marvel at are Edlund's special effects. Absolutely nobody is better at depicting disintegrating heads, but it's no laughing matter.
IN BRIEF: Made 10 years ago, Jamie Uys's "Animals are Beautiful People" is having a belated New York debut on the heels of his incredibly successful "The Gods Must Be Crazy. " The South African film maker's nascent style is discernible in this earlier work, an almost-documentary about wildlife in the Dark Continent.
I say almost-documentary because of the tongue-in-cheek narration, which stresses anthromorphic humor. (Animals, fish, flowers, and even clouds are compared to human beings at various points.) Several sequences seem to be clearly staged (including, appallingly, a fire in a nesting place) for dramatic effect, and animation is used in several places.
Uys reportedly shot 500,000 feet of film over four years, and he's captured some remarkable sights. Among them are a snake capable of swallowing whole an egg 10 times as big as its head, and a colony of animals becoming intoxicated from fermented fruits. There are no human beings in the film, aside from a brief appearance by several bushmen.
"Animals are Beautiful People" is a good place to take the kids. Adults won't be bored, either. -
"The Return of the Living Dead." A comedy-thriller starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Thom Mathews and Don Calfa. Written and directed by Dan O'Bannon. Based on a story by Rudy Ricci, John Russo and Russell Streiner. Photographed by Jules Brenner. Edited by Robert Gordes. Music by Matt Clifford. Running time: 90 minutes. An Orion release. In area theaters.
Unlike the George A. Romero movies that its spoofing, Dan O'Bannon's "The Return of the Living Dead" is not a horror film that becomes an endurance ordeal.
On the contrary, "The Return of the Living Dead" is malicious fun, using Romero's flesh-eating zombies as far-out symbols of modern man's insatiable appetite for control. What Romero has forgotten, O'Bannon (one of the authors of the movie "Alien") remembers: Anything eerie has to be contrasted against humor for maximum effect.
Whereas Romeo's last zombie movie, the recent "Day of the Dead," suffered from being too unendurably gory and somber, "The Return of the Living Dead" is uncommonly witty. It is hardly a parasite living off George Romero's undead menaces; it comes with its own brand of unwholesomeness and nastiness.
O'Bannon's best contribution to the material, the one element that gives his movie its neat twist, is his pitting the walking dead against what he views as their live counterparts - punks. With dark circles painted under their eyes, their green lips, and hair that looks like coagulated blood, these modern rebels-without-a-cause should identify, if anything, with O'Bannon's oozing zombies. There should be a meeting of the minds, but there isn't. They should be ready to party with their blood brothers. Instead, they panic.
The dirctor has set his movie in a macabre cul-de-sac consisting of a medical-supply warehouse (which houses preserved corpses for experimentation), a funeral parlor and a cemetery. The first half-hour or so is a jokey explanation of what's to follow: One of the pickled corpses is nuked by some military-invented "animating" dust and, after it comes to life, it is cremated at the neighboring mortuary.
Just as smoke begins to fill the air, it starts to rain, and the nearby graves are doused with the revitalizing, but lethal, particles. All hell breaks loose. Cops and medics arrive, only to be eaten alive; the zombies take control of the fog-covered patrol cars and ambulances, using their radios to order more cops and medics.
Meanwhile, the warehouse lunks (Clu Gulager, James Karen and Thom Mathews), the mortician (Don Calfa) and the traumatized punks race back and forth among the three locations, creating a murkbath effect. Somehow, there's a certain insidious charm to all of this.
Horrormongers should have a ball at "The Return of the Living Dead." The rest of us should find some humor in the assorted half-life running amok on screen.
I know I did.
Parental Guide: Rated R for its sick humor and gore. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FILM: HORROR IN 'THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD'
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 19, 1985
Author: Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic
In The Return of the Living Dead, the zombies subsist on the brains of live humans. They won't find anything to eat in theaters showing Dan O'Bannon's dreadful movie.
The acting is so bad that it's hard in most scenes to tell the walking dead from the supposedly living, and as an attempt to mingle horror with humor, O'Bannon's film is as hilarious as an autopsy.
As the title indicates, The Return of the Living Dead is a salute to George Romero's 1968 cult horror movie, Night of the Living Dead - a film that contains its own streak of black humor. Romero recently released Day of the Dead - the third film in the zombie series - and it was hard to imagine anyone coming up with a worse film this year.
O'Bannon, a scriptwriter making his directing bow, picks up Romero's shovel, walks into the cemetery and obliges. A glance at his writing credits - which include the visceral, terrifying Alien - is enough to show that O'Bannon knows the dynamics of horror films. Alien was a very slick exercise in tension that moved at a clip that allowed one to forget that the characters often chose the dumbest course of action.
I can't think of anything dumber than what O'Bannon seems to have tried in The Return of the Living Dead. I say seems because his intentions are not easily divined in this slapdash mess that hinges on the idea of Romero's zombies getting a new lease on life through the accidental release of a chemical at a medical-supply warehouse run by Clu Gulager.
O'Bannon's apparent purpose is to provoke laughter and nausea. The latter comes easily enough because The Return of the Living Dead indulges in tasteful scenes of beheading, blood-slinging and zombies biting chunks out of people's skulls. O'Bannon stops just short of Romero, who is the screen's leading gorenographer.
Anyone who has been in an airplane in bad weather knows that nervous laughter is a common response to fear. Eliciting that response in a horror context is extremely difficult and certainly beyond the grasp of O'Bannon. Arguably, it hasn't been brought off successfully since Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein 10 years ago.
Brooks had something to parody: the most popular myth in all of horror film and literature. O'Bannon has Romero, and it's no contest.
The Return of the Living Dead has a hopelessly crude plot that essentially repeats the typical Romero premise. The dead come scrambling out of their graves and surround the living in an enclosed space. In this case, it's a crematorium, which is where O'Bannon's defiantly witless script belongs.
There are, for reasons that are presumably clear to O'Bannon if no one else, scenes of a punk party in a cemetery complete with a striptease. While the kids are dancing on the graves, the dead rise up to protest the loud music by dining on the partygoers.
By the time this aimless digression arrives, the film has done enough to render the average moviegoer brain-dead. That surely was the condition of the studio executives who gave O'Bannon the money for this appalling and stupid exercise.
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD *
Produced by Tom Fox, directed and written by Dan O'Bannon, photography by Jules Brenner, music by Matt Clifford, distributed by Orion Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 31 minutes.
Burt - Clu Gulager
Frank - James Karen
Ernie - Don Calfa
Freddy - Thom Mathews
Parent's guide: R (extremely violent) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRAIN-EATING ZOMBIES: IT'S GREAT STUFF, BUT WHY?
SACRAMENTO BEE - August 16, 1985
Author: George Williams Bee Reviewer
WHAT MAKES a good horror movie? Obviously, the Frankenstein and King Kong stories are established classics. Most of the rest produced by Hollywood have been mediocre, but 'The Night of the Living Dead' and its sequels are exceptions.
These are stories about zombies created through screwball experiments by the U.S. Army. The army develops a gas that transforms corpses into living creatures who are forced to relieve the pain of being dead by eating the brains of normal humans.
Apart from being monumentally gruesome, the movies have built a growing fandom creating crowds whenever 'Living Dead' films are scheduled at midnight cult screenings from coast to coast and overseas.
The series was originated by George Romero, an inventive director and writer from Pittsburgh. He wrote the first of the series with Jack Russo. Russo, following the success of the first film, rewrote the story in the form of a novel with the same title. The rights to the title were purchased by Hollywood screenwriter Dan O'Bannon ('Alien,' 'Blue Thunder').
So now 'The Return of the Living Dead,' written and directed by O'Bannon, is being released in competition with Romero's second sequel, 'Day of the Dead,' soon to be released.
O'Bannon's film is a slickly made thriller, a first-rate example of the horror genre.
Clu Gulager stars as the proprietor of a medical-supply business in Louisville who discovers a number of the zombies, encased in airtight drums, have been shipped to him by mistake and are stored in his basement. A couple of his night workers open a drum by mistake, allowing the gas to escape. And there is a cemetery across the street.
Along comes a band of punkers who decide to use the cemetery as a meeting place just as all those graves start producing signs of life, or, I should state, living dead. And then there's a mortuary nearby that becomes the main target of the zombies because there are a bunch of humans inside.
It'll probably be a fast-food stop for the zombies. I mean, if you've got brains, what are you doing hanging around a mortuary next to a graveyard where the corpses are emerging from their graves?
Gulager waits until his two employees start changing into zombies before he figures out it might be a good idea to call the 800 number printed on the sides of those drums. As he'll find out, the army has a contingency plan for such emergencies, a plan just as imaginative as the one responsible for those zombies in the first place.
The movie is filled with shocks and thrills - a good entertainment. I don't know why. Who can explain why a movie about living corpses who eat human brains as a form of aspirin can draw a crowd? Especially one in which the zombies are made to look so real (by specialist Bill Munns, who studied the mummies of Guanjuanato, a small Mexican village where the bodies of local people have been kept in various stages of deterioration ranging from two to 100 years).
I sure can't. I only know it's made well by a group of filmmakers out to show you a good time at the movies.
THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD Cast: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Beverly Randolph, John Philbin, Jewel Shepard. Writer-director: Dan O'Bannon. Producer: Tom Fox. Photography: Jules Brenner. Special makeup effects: Bill Munns. Production design: William Stout. Music: Matt Clifford. Distributor: Orion.
Arden, Sunrise.
Rating: R, for violence, nudity ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A ROMP WITH ROMERO'S ZOMBIES
The Record (New Jersey) - August 16, 1985
Author: By Lou Lumenick, Movie Critic: The Record
MOVIE REVIEW THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD: Directed and written by Dan O'Bannon. Story by Rudy Ricci, John Russo, and Russell Streiner. Music, Matt Clifford. Photography, Jules Brenner. Editor, Robert Gordon. With Clu Gulager (Burt), James Karen (Frank), Don Calfa (Ernie), Thom Mathews (Freddy), Beverly Randolph (Tina), and others. Produced by Tom Fox. A Hemdale presentation released by Orion Pictures. Opens locally today. Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R: nudity, violence, strong lang uage, gore.
To say that "Return of the Living Dead" is more entertaining than "Day of the Dead" is like stating you'd prefer death by firing squad to death by hanging. Either way, it's a pretty nasty experience.
"Day of the Dead," George Romero's recent, second sequel to his 1968 cult classic, "Night of the Living Dead," was mostly an excuse to demonstrate some state of the art, stomach-churning special effects. "Return of the Living Dead," a sort of pseudo- sequel, is more playful and a bit easier to sit through.
The premise of "Return" is that Romero's original film was inspired by a real-life incident at a veterans hospital in Pittsburgh. Fourteen years later, the chemicals that turned corpses into walking, flesh-eating zombies are sitting in the basement of a medical supply house in Louisville. It's all because of an army paperwork error.
Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon ("Alien," "Lifeforce"), who is also making his directorial debut, contrives for the chemicals to reanimate the population of a nearby cemetery. The ghouls mix it up with a band of punk rockers, a pair of medical-supply employees (Clu Gulager, James Karen), and a nervous mortician (Don Calfa).
Though he strives to parody Romero's brand of claustrophobic horror , O'Bannon ends up with the kind of cheerful cheapie that Roger Corman used to slap together in a couple of days. The acting is deliberately broad, the special effects are cheesy, and the humor runs to jokes about rigor mortis. The effect is deadening.
MOVIE REVIEW- `The Stuff' an addictive, nonsensical horror spoof
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - October 29, 1985
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
"The Stuff" shows us what might've happened if The Blob or the pods from "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" had had an imaginative creative-marketing director.
This ingenius horror -movie spoof is dedicated to the proposition that the American public will swallow anything if it's well-packaged -even an "anything " that wants to swallow them right back.
"The Stuff" is the brainchild of Larry Cohen, who gave us a homicidal infant in "It's Alive" and a winged serpent over Manhattan in "Q." The Stuff itself is some creamy white goop that looks like a cross between Tofutti, milk of magnesia and Stuckey's Divinity. It is the perfect non-food: low calorie, good-tasting and doesn't spot when spilled.
It is also a threat to the future of the ice cream industry, whose top dogs w ant to copy, er, improve on it. To find out The Stuff's secret formula, they hire a seedy industrial spy (Michael Moriarty) whose slow drawl masks some quick wits. "No man is as dumb as I appear to be," he good-naturedly, but pointedly, reminds his new bosses.
Moriarty isn't dumb, and he soon discovers there's more to The Stuff than meets the mouth. Like a certain other white substance, The Stuff turns people into addicts - stuff-heads, so to speak.
"One lick is never enough" goes the cheery jingle devised by The Stuff's advertising director, Andrea Marcovicci. For once, we have truth in advertising (and wit, too - Cohen's sendups of TV spots, featuring everyone from Clara "Where's the Beef?" Peller to Tammy Grimes, are hilarious). One lick and the next day your refrigerator is stuffed with The Stuff and you're talking like a TV commercial yourself.
But . . . are people eating The Stuff or is it eating them?
Moriarty realizes The Stuff must be stopped. He's joined by a properly repent ant Ms. Marcovicci, a cookie king named Chocolate Chip Charlie (Garrett Morris) and a kid from Long Island (Scott Bloom) who turned into a junior Ralph Nader after he saw The Stuff crawling around the family fridge one night.
These three Stuff-busters end up in Georgia, where they enlist the unlikely aid of a paranoid paramilitary fanatic (Paul Sorvino) to destroy The Stuff factory. Sorvino, who's the kind of right-winger who thinks fluoride in our water is a commie plot, also owns a radio station in Atlanta, supposedly located at Fourth and Main. Mr. Cohen needs to brush up on his geography, unless he wants us Southerners to flood his office with mail asking how to find the corner of Peachtree and Broadway i n Manhattan.
Like its title character, "The Stuff" has a tendency to bite off more than it can chew. Cohen overstuffs "The Stuff." It's a horror movie, a horror -movie sp oof, a cautionary tale about corporate greed, a consumer fable proving you can fool some of the people all of the time, and a wickedly funny anti-drug parable. With all that going on and less than 90 minutes to sort everything out, the film can't help but seem a bit cartoonish and one-dimensional.
Still, a surplus of good ideas is certainly preferable to a surfeit of them. "The Stuff" may, at heart, be all stuff and nonsense, but it's the right stuff and the right nonsense.
The Stuff: A horror spoof about a tasty new dessert. Starring Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci and Paul Sorvino. Directed by Larry Cohen. Movie Guide: code rating, R; sex, none; violence, considerable; nudity, none; language, some cursing. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HORROR -COMEDY 'THE STUFF' JUST OOZES STUPIDITY
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - September 21, 1985
Author: DAVID N. ROSENTHAL, Mercury News Entertainment Writer
FIRST there was "The Right Stuff," about those magnificent men and their flying machines. Now comes "The Stuff," about those magnificent stuffies and their addictive glop. Any resemblance between the two stuffs is purely alphabetical. For the best thing that can be said about just plain "Stuff" is that it isn't as bad as it looks in the ads. There's not much blood and the scariest thing in it is a lava flow of white something-or-other that looks like a cross between melted marshmallows and window caulking.
It's this sticky-sweet substance that plays the title role. Like yogurt, The Stuff comes in brightly colored plastic containers and can be eaten cold, at room temperature or frozen like ice cream. Versatile stuff, this Stuff.
There's only one teensy-weensy little problem with this taste sensation that's sweeping the nation: It's still alive. It seems to multiply at will and take over those who consume it, which seems to be almost everyone.
We don't know why The Stuff does what it does, it just does. And somebody's got to stop it.
Which is where Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris and Paul Sorvino come in. Instead of searching for a better picture to spend their considerable talents on, they go Stuff hunting, spurred on by a little boy (Scott Bloom) who discovers this Stuff isn't right at all.
There are moments approaching humor in this not-so- horrifying flick, such as when Sorvino shoots a Stuffie, who oozes white instead of bleeding red, prompting Sorvino to say, "I kinda like the sight of blood, but this is disgusting."
But even more frequent are dumb moments and dumb dialogue, such as when Moriarty announces he is going to hot-wire a truck and later tells Marcovicci the keys are under the seat.
In the end, "The Stuff" isn't scary enough to be a quality horror film, it isn't funny enough to be a quality spoof and it isn't interesting enough to be much else.
And that, my friends, is definitely the Wrong Stuff.
The Stuff
(star) 1/2
Rated: R ( horror )
Cast: Michael Moriarty, Andrea Marcovicci, Garrett Morris, Scott Bloom, Paul Sorvino, Danny Aiello, Patrick O'Neal
Director: Larry Cohen
Screenwriter: Larry Cohen
Studio: New World Pictures
At: San Jose Meridian, Sunnyvale 6, Oakridge 6, Saratoga 6, Capitol Square
Movie Review- `Creepers' is so awful it'll probably drive you buggy
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - November 20, 1985
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
When people ask me why I like a movie like "Nightmare on Elm Street," I try to tell about a movie like "Creepers." The former reminds us that hack-'em-ups can be done well; the latter reminds us that most of them are not.
For about 90 minutes, "Creepers" skims off all that is brutal and ugly in so many music videos - screaming girls, screaming rock score, disconnected images, disconnected bodies. It does offer one indelible image that neatly sums up the entire slasher genre: a chimpanzee wielding a straight razor. However, I'm not certain this symbolism is intentional.
The heroine is Jennifer (Jennifer Connelly), a matinee idol's daughter who's been shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland. "It's a very unusual area," says one of Jennifer's new teachers. "People call it the Swiss Transylvania."
Hmm . . . wonder if Reagan and Gorbachev know that.
But vampires in lederhosen aren't what's creeping around in "Creepers." Instead, it's "The Hellstrom Chronicle" meets "Friday the 13th." You see, bugs are batty over Jennifer and look after her the way the rats looked after Willard.
She could use some looking after, because there's a homicidal maniac lurking near the school who's already killed several girls about Jennifer's size. Naturally, Jennifer is scared, but not too scared to stop running around the Swiss-Transylvanian countryside by herself, preferably after dark.
After a number of manglings and dismemberings and a few dull dialogue scenes (in one, Jennifer sexually arouses a stink bug), there's the final showdown: insane killer vs. insect cavalry.
Let's hear it for the fruit fly.
"Creepers," which was directed by a mad Italian named Dario Argento of "Suspiria" fame, is so fruit-loopy that I would unhesitatingly recommend it to connoisseurs of so-bad-they're-good movies. Anyone else will most likely leave the theater looking for the nearest can of insect repellent. Unfortunately, there's nothing to spray on repellent movies such as "Creepers."
Creepers:A horror movie starring Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasance; directed by Dario Argento. Movie Guide: code rating, R; sex, none; violence, extreme; nudity, none; language, some profanity.
Should we be grateful that George Romero has returned his dead once again?
Not really. "Day of the Dead," the director's third walking-corpse film, lacks the cut-rate charm and stylistic audacity of his first, 1968's "Night of the Living Dead," and the brash action and allegory of his second, '79's "Dawn of the Dead," whose shopping-mall siege by Romero's incredibly mixed up zombies was arguably a metaphor for mindless consumerism.
Day offers little in the way of such social commentary, nor is there even very much horror , save for the state-of-the-art effects and makeup work.
Longtime Romero colleague Tom Savini has again created some smashing "special makeup effects" (as the credit goes) that are ideal for the kind of horror fans who read Fangoria magazine and pore over stills of stiffs.
Thanks to Savini's art of illusion and knack for hacking, arms are chopped off with less than surgical precision, heads are ripped from torsos in mid-scream, and disembowelments leave a sloppy, juicy trail of entrails.
In short, there's plenty of the kind of gory gut-spilling that would earn any film an X rating - provided, of course, it was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America.
But Romero - like the makers of the recent "Re-Animator - " ignored the MPAA, thereby sidestepping the problem of theaters who decline to show X movies and newspapers who refuse to run X-movie ads.
As a guide, that leaves consumers with reviewers, and this one's verdict is: Even adult audiences should steer clear.
Romero's plot (he also wrote the script) involves a small band of humans holed up in an underground complex somewhere in sunlit Florida (he must have wearied of his home state of Pennsylvania). The zombie plague initiated in the first film has spread. Except for the 12 or so survivors, the only ambulatory creatures in sight are in advanced stages of decomposition and hungry for living flesh.
These lurching, pitiful parodies of people are the true stars of any "Dead" film, but we don't see much of them for "Day's" first two-thirds, during which the survivors - a volatile mix of military and scientific types - are constantly fighting among themselves. Their dialogue is unrelentingly - and dully - macho and profane, and their acting is full of strident screaming and gnashing of teeth.
It's all mean-natured, mindless stuff, evoking little interest in or sympathy for the characters. An exception is Terry Alexander, another efficient, cool-headed black in the mold of Duane Jones from "Night of the Living Dead." And Lori Cardille, the camp's sole female, scores some points as a sensible alternative to the men's violent posturing.
There's also a feeble subplot about domesticating the zombies, but none of it really matters until the end. That's when Romero - as if to say, "Let's party" - finally cranks up the action.
From then on, it isn't bad - as far as these things go. With 500 pounds of barbecued turkey legs standing in for human flesh, Romero and Savini again show their mastery of the horror -movie gross-out. But that's about all their new movie has to offer.
The pity is that Romero didn't try to camp it up a bit. Earlier this year, "Return of the Living Dead" - a related film but one he didn't make - achieved some high comedy with the same kind of low elements. And we know Romero can handle humor, as demonstrated by "Creepshow," his collaboration with Stephen King.
But "Day of the Dead" is just that - dead.
That's not to say inert - the action quota is high enough to satisfy the patient. But there's little sense of drama or adventurousness to spark it - and certainly no subtlety - so that overall, "Day of the Dead" seems much like one of Romero's shambling zombies: plodding, predictable and fit to be buried and forgotten. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'THE DEAD' RETURN
Miami Herald, The (FL) - November 5, 1985
Author: BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic
From Night of the Living Dead through Dawn of the Dead and now, to the concluding eruption of George Romero's gore trilogy, Day of the Dead, Romero has kept audiences off-balance. His zombie jamborees are so gruesome, and Romero keeps up on the latest in splatter-effects techniques so devotedly, that one is tempted to dismiss them as the very worst of a bad lot. After all, dismemberment is a limited form, and explicit gore hard to redeem.
But one may not dismiss Romero or his trilogy, because there has always been a filmmaking intelligence behind the work. This is as true of Day of the Dead as it was of Night and Dawn. And though Romero seems unlikely ever to reach the black-comic heights of Dawn, in which waves of zombies descended on a suburban shopping mall in answer to some sort of deep-seated genetic call, Day of the Dead has its moments of narrative depth.
By Day, the zombies who were first seen in scattered packs in the Pennsylvania countryside in Night have all but taken over the world. The principal survivors are holed up somewhere in southern Florida, where a detachment of troops uneasily coexists with a small group of scientists working on a living- dead cure. As usual, Romero has a metaphor handy: One of the scientists, whom the soldiers refer to with murderous disdain as "Dr. Frankenstein," has been vivisecting some of the zombies and attempting to train others as ghastly pets.
It's not subtle, this business, but compared to the desultory attempts at subtexts found in most contemporary horror films, it amounts to High Theme. It also provides comic relief -- what else to do but laugh when Frankenstein's great achievement turns out to be feeding his zombie without losing any fingers? -- as well as establishing the films' first sympathetic walking dead, a spaniel-eyed giant played marvelously by Howard Sherman.
As is traditional, such fooling where man is not meant to fool must bring judgment down on Frankenstein as well as on the loutish soldiers who threaten his work. Eventually, since this is Romero and these are his Dead, Day becomes a bloodbath of epic proportions. Tom Savini, a special makeup-effects craftsman, manages to move the state of the art another revolting step "forward," and Day of the Dead offers what are easily the screen's most graphic decapitations and disembowelings. Those with the stomach for it will find in this film revelations concerning special effects: They are astonishing.
But strong stomachs are called for. Romero does not cut away. He is not shy, and though Day of the Dead is the best performed and best written of the three films, and is clearly the work of a serious filmmaker, it is not for the unwary. Romero makes you pay for that theme. He must be approached by novices in the way that timid eaters approach a Japanese restaurant -- very, very carefully.
Day of the Dead (U) ** 1/2
CAST: Lori Cardille, Joseph Pilato, Richard Liberty, Terry Alexander, Howard Sherman, G. Howard Klar.
CREDITS: Director: George Romero. Producer: Richard P. Rubinstein. Screenwriter: George Romero. Cinematographer: Michael Gornick. Music: John Harrison.
A United Film Distribution release. Running time: 102 minutes. Vulgar language, much violence and gore.
He's Heeeeere. That's Right. Pittsburgh's own George A. Romero is back with his latest zombie jamboree, "Day of the Dead." And as anyone who has squirmed and gagged through parts 1 and 2 of the filmmaker's "Living Dead" trilogy can vouch, we're talking state-of-the-art gore effects here.
So what's the big deal? You've already braved the chest- bursting in "Alien" and the flesh-eating in last summer's campy "Return of the Living Dead." After these splatterfests, what can be so terrible?
Obviously you've forgotten what a wacked-out original Romero is. He turned "Dawn" into an outrageous satire on consumerism gone amok (with zombies going through reflex motions in a shopping mall), and he has again confounded all expectations and -- for what it's worth -- set grisly new standards for the much-maligned genre.
''Day" may have fewer picnicking zombies than "Night" or "Dawn," but the ones that have made it to the screen are ghastly beyond words. I can well imagine morgue attendants' knees turning to jelly at the sight of Romero and makeup artist Tom ("Creepshow") Savini's latest descent into Living Dead purgatory.
This warning tendered, I can now go on to proclaim "Day" as Romero's most sophisticated and effective fright tale yet. Like everything else the independent filmmaker has done, "Day" cooks on at least three levels -- as grim chiller, rude black comedy and an almost-poignant comment on our desensitization.
''Day" also reminds us that Romero is our bravest and most talented horror specialist, which is obviously why no less an expert in the macabre than Stephen King has been a longtime champion and collaborator. (Romero's new project may be an adaptation of King's "Pet Semetary.")
''Day" picks up where "Dawn" (1979) breaks off: with a small group of people in a helicopter looking for sanctuary from the living dead, which have now taken over all the cities. The not-so-lucky survivors are based in a missile silo somewhere in Florida. The irony, of course, is that the corpses drool and drag themselves through the glorious daylight topside while the living bury themselves for protection.
It's in the clammy, cavernlike setting that 12 humans fight among themselves and attempt to find a cure for the plague above. The medical research team is led by a tough scientist (Lori Cardille) and a crazed "Dr. Frankenstein" (Richard Liberty) who wants to "civilize" and domesticate the zombies like cattle.
What's left of the military contingent takes orders from a psycho named Rhodes (Romeo regular Joseph Pilato). A third group, represented by the seemingly passive Jamaican copter pilot (Terry Alexander), favors an escape to paradise, wherever that may be.
As in Howard Hawks' classic "The Thing," the chief conflict here is between knowledge (learn from the zombies) and brute force (blast the buggers to kingdom come). Unlike Hawks, who favored the quick military solution, Romero advocates a mix of humanity and scientific common sense, represented (again, ironically) by the two historically persecuted factions -- the female scientist and the black pilot.
As for egghead "Frankenstein," he's down in his blood- splattered chamber of horrors attempting to recondition a zombie he has affectionately nicknamed "Bub" (Howard Sherman). The scenes of this pathetic thing struggling to remember its human past -- and such trivial pursuits as shaving and saluting an officer -- contain a pathos not usually associated with Romero.
If any of this makes sense to you -- and, indeed, if you're able to peer beyond the appalling carnage to what is, in essence, a primitive allegory/morality tale -- edge very cautiously toward the dark of "Day."
The more literal-minded are warned to keep away. All they will find are horrors beyond description, a Hades on Earth beyond anything Dante imagined.
DAY OF THE DEAD. Written, directed by George A. Romero. No MPAA rating (but gets an R -- under 17 not admitted unless accompanied by adult). (star)(star)(star) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 'DAY OF DEAD' FAILS TO FRIGHTEN
Boston Globe - August 23, 1985
Author: Michael Blowen, Globe Staff
Writer-director George Romero must think the audience for his "Dead" pictures is as zombified as
the creatures who inhabit his so-called horror pictures. That's the only excuse for the vile "Day of the Dead" - one of the most rediculously acted, poorly written and stagnantly directed movies of the year.
Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), a black-and-white cult film that introduced the director's wry sense of social satire, was followed by "Dawn of the Dead" (1979), a gory parody of America's shopping-mall mentality. Now, it's "Day of the Dead," and the sun is no longer shining on the cultish director. It's as if he has fallen victim to his own creations and is simply going through the mechanical motions.
This time a handful of humans, surrounded by voracious zombies, are stuck in a Florida compound that looks like an abandoned missile silo. Sarah, portrayed by Lori Cardille, a woman whose voice is the equivalent of an eternal auto alarm, is trying to save her life, and those of her crew. That's the story.
Humor and horror , the ingredients that made the first two "Dead" films successful, are virtually absent from this third and, I hope, final episode. Instead of creating frightening moments of zombies screeching at the screen or satirical asides about the mind-set that led the world into zombieland, Romero seems fixated completely on the gore. After watching the creatures disembowel, decapitate and disgorge a few victims, disgust is the only emotion left. In fact, Romero's sets are beginning to look more like meat-packing factories after a hard day's work than real locations.
Even for fans of the genre, "Day of the Dead" has absolutely no frightening moments. Maybe the only thing that can really kill zombies is if they die at the box office. Caption: PHOTO
Memo: MOVIE REVIEW DAY OF THE DEAD - Written and directed by George A.
Romero, produced by Richard P. Rubenstein, starring Lori
Cardille, Terry Alexander and Joseph Pilato, at the Pi
Alley and suburban cinemas, rated R (vulgar language and
Author: Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic At least cult goreographer George Romero gives the customers fair and early warning that a strong stomach and perhaps a brown paper bag are prerequisites for making it through Day of the Dead. My quarrel is with the way he does it.
A zombie lies on an autopsy table with his stomach removed and his entrails spilling onto the floor. Later on, lest you missed this cautionary sign, a woman sees her lover bid an abrupt farewell to his vital organs.
And there is far more to come. Some of the entrails for Day of the Dead, which is the finest movie yet made in Wampum, Pa., came from the local slaughterhouse. Much of the film looks as if it were shot there.
Given all this blood slinging, it's understandable that the characters do a lot of drinking and cursing. After all, they're the ones who have to read Romero's script, and it gives most of them the opportunity to inspect their livers firsthand for damage. (They're lying on the floor, next to the heads.)
But Romero's fans wouldn't have it any other way. Day of the Dead resumes the series that began in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead. Romero shot that film for $114,000 and laughed all the way to the blood bank as it quickly became a cult favorite for its combination of gruesome horror and humor.
The Pittsburgh filmmaker followed it up a decade later with Dawn of the Dead. The same conflict between zombies who still have their stomachs and humans who decline to be the entree was staged in an abandoned shopping mall. Some critics claimed to find a satiric intention, but all I saw was a beheading, cannibalism and a general pandering to the zombies who get their kicks watching graphic murders.
Day of the Dead has something of a split personality and why not? Everything else gets cut up in the movie. Romero, essentially repeating the ideas of the first two movies, has tried to inject a debate between soldiers and scientists. He has also included a generous amount of humor, whose purpose strikes me as more of an attempt to reassure the audience than to elevate the film.
The leader of the soldiers makes Rambo look like a wimp, and there are good scientists and bad scientists. They are all stuck in a missile silo (actually a limestone mine where, in real life, the good burghers of Wampum park their trailers and boats). Up above, roaming outside, are the zombies.
In that early-warning scene, the bad scientist is examining a zombie to discover what makes him tick, an experiment that could well be extended to people who like watching this kind of thing. In a sly, inside joke, Romero seeks to revive the zombie's memory of the good old days by giving him a copy of Salem's Lot, written by that other well-known horror conglomerate, Stephen King. Romero and King collaborated on Creepshow in 1982, and the director's schedule is clogged with future productions of the author's novels.
The scientist is a man who keeps his head when all about him are losing theirs, and he is known in some of the more snide corners of the silo as Dr. Frankenstein. But it is left to him to give the definitive opinion of Day of the Dead in what amounts to another warning to the audience.
Rounding upon the recalcitrant zombie, he says, "That wasn't very nice, you know. Not nice at all. You can just sit there in the dark."
Or you can shake your head in incredulity and walk out of the theater.
DAY OF THE DEAD *
Produced by Richard P. Rubinstein, directed and written by George A. Romero, photography by Michael Gornick, music by John Harrison, distributed by United Film Distribution Co..
Running time: 1 hour, 42 mins.
Sarah - Lori Cardille
John - Terry Alexander
Rhodes - Joseph Pilato
Dr. Logan - Richard Liberty
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (extreme violence and gore, profanity)
